After arriving back in all of our lives by showing off his latest project, god game Masters of Albion, at Gamescom Opening Night Live, veteran developer Peter Molyneux has now been asked what kinds of changes and evolutions he thinks the next few decades of gaming might see. His answer? More Hollywood adaptations and, well, AI.
The controversial dev, who was once a key figure in Fable, and has since done some other stuff that’s often proven polarising or bizarre, was asked – along with a bunch of other industry figures – by Eurogamer where he thinks the world of video games be in 25 years time.
“AI is going to be a real game changer,” Molyneux said as part of his answer, “There will come a time where AI will be used to create huge parts of a game – AI-generated characters, animations, dialogue, VO, there is so much that AI will be able to tackle.”
He added that he thinks AI will “allow anyone to make games”, explaining: “You will be able to, for example, create a game from one single prompt such as ‘Make a battle royale set on a pirate ship’ and your AI will go and do that for you.” Yep, I know, that’s definitely a very Peter Molyneux thing to say.
He also said that he thinks Hollywood is “going to continue to be fascinated with games and keep on coming for more game stories and narrative”, a trend that’s become pretty obvious following the runaway successes of things like Amazon’s Fallout TV Show, The Last of Us, and the Super Mario Movie.
Molyneux wasn’t the only dev to provide an answer that discussed AI, with Tango Gameworks founder Shinji Mikami saying that he thinks it’s “going to become a lot bigger and a much more prominent element in game development and game creation”.
“You’ll be able to stick it in a game and have the AI decide for itself ‘Okay, so this character, how would this character think? How would this character talk? How is he going to react in a situation?’,” he said, “There’s not a whole lot that can be changed as far as backgrounds, but animations and stuff like that could all be, in 25 years, completely AI-generated. And so the importance of the creation of backgrounds and actual animations, I feel that there’s going to be a much bigger gap than there is now. That’s one of the things that is a bit daunting.”
How have these answers left you feeling about the future of our funny medium, and what do you think it holds? Let us know below.
